I Need Asian Hades Now

Summary

Western mythologies dominate games industry, overshadowing rich Asian mythologies with diverse stories and deities.
Lack of representation of Asian mythologies in games leaves out fascinating stories and important cultural aspects.
Games industry needs more diversity in mythologies explored to showcase a wider range of stories and deities to players.

Have you accepted our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ? I mean, of course, as a character in , which I’ve been thinking about ever since I saw 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:this sick fan art of what Jesus would 🐭look like in the game. Part of what makes Hades 2 so fun is the rabidly creative community around it, a fact that demonstrate꧒s itself over and over again as fans find new and surprising ways to engage with an incomplete game.

took off partly because of its interpretations of Greek mythology and how it weaved those stories into its roguelike gameplay. The Western world has been fixated on Greek mythology for eons, telling and retelling its stories throug🦩h different lenses and mediums. There’s a wealth of stories here that impacted the way we see the world and even the words we use – I, myself, grew obsessed with the story of Tantalus when I was a teenager and how that story is the root of the English word ‘tantalising’.

Asian Mythology Deserves Time In The Spotlight

But after seeing that one drawing of Jesus Christ, I suddenly found myself thinking about how so many games are obsessed with Western mythologies. There are thousands of religions in the world, many of them with millions of followers and fascinating stories in their own right, but many of them are so much less showcased. We see plenty of Norse mythology – , which started as an exploration of Greek mythology, has since ventured into the Norse pantheon, as does the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hellblade series. But there’s very little representation of Asian mythologies outside of Japanese depictions. I love Japanese mythology, but there are other parts of Asia!

Did you think I was gonna talk about Hermes? I’m saving that ho🧜t take for another day.

Of course, I’m a little biased since I was r🐻aised in multicultural Singapore and come from two very different Asian cultures. My parents weren’t religious and I was raised an atheist, but my extended families all practice different religions. I’ve observed the rituals a🦹nd deities of many different religions from afar, and it always stuns me that the mainstream doesn’t seem to be interested in these mythologies.

Let’s take Chinese mythology, for example. We’ve seen some progress in representation here, with games like Black Myth: Wukong taking on the wildly popular Sun Wukong as its protagonist, but deities that are so often cited in casual conversation that they’re practically memes in Asia are basically unknown to the rest of the world. Why is it that I, an Asian in Asia, am inundated with retellings of Western mytꦬhologies but never get to see Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, in the wild? Where are the Dragon Gods? What about the nine-tailed foxes of Chinese mythology, which spread to the mytholoꦏgies of the rest of Asia?

And don’t even get me started on Hindu mythology, which is full of some of the most brutal gods and goddesses I’ve ever seen. Everybody already knows that quote, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” because of Oppenheimer. Fewer know that it’s a butchered version of a line from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most important Hindu scriptures, and was originally attributed to Lord Krishna, one of the most widely worshipped Hindu deities in the world. Kali, the four-armed goddess of Destruction and Creation known for her violent bloodlust, is🤪 often depicted with bloody weapons and a garland of human heads. Kali, he🎃rself, is simply a form of the Mother Goddess Parvati. There are layers to this, it’s fascinating, and games don’t care.

The Problem Isn’t The Mythology, It’s The Games Industry

Am I saying that Supergiant needs to pivot to characters from an unfamiliar religion? Not at all. It’s less that I want Hades 2 to be Asian, but more that I want more Asian developers to tell stories that are familiar to them. Greek mythology has spawned play after play, movie after movie, game after game, but it’s still rare that I see deep explorations of my cultures, despite the fact that the two cultures I come from include literally billions of people in the two m♔ost populous൩ countries in the world.

I don’t want Hades 2 to be Asian, I want a game with Asian mythologies to break out the way Hades did. I want there to be just as much fascination with mythologies outside of the West because there are so many stories to be told that are being overlooked. I want to be awed, terrified, and entertained by depictions of the deities I see adorning the temples I walk past every day. Maybe one day the games industry will get there, but for now, I’m stuck with Greek gods, Loki, and Jesus Chri♓st.